That exemplary dissident Oscar Wilde, whose punishment failed to erase his words but taught us something about where a loose tongue might get you, wrote, at the end of the 19th century, "When people talk to us about others they are usually dull. When they talk to us about themselves they are nearly always interesting." This essay concerns something we are and take for granted: that we are speaking animals, full of words with a profound effect on others, words that are sometimes welcomed, and sometimes not. I want to say something about words which seem possible and others that seem impossible.

It is no coincidence that the political and social systems that have dominated our era - communism, global capitalism, fascism, imperialism, the nuclear family, different varieties of fundamentalist religion, to name but a few - are marked by a notable factor. There are circumstances when they don't want people talking about their lives. Tyrants are involved with silence as a form of control. Who says what to whom, and about what, is of compelling interest to authorities, to dictators, fathers, teachers, and officials of whichever type.

As Milan Kundera pointed out in his great novel The Joke, there are times when the need to be funny is so subversive it can land you in jail. Isaac Babel, who was murdered in prison, and called a book "the world seen through an individual", was himself not unaware of the ironies here, and said, "Whenever an educated person is arrested in the Soviet Union and finds himself in a prison cell, he is given a pencil and paper and told 'write!'"

What his interrogators wanted were words. But of course the meaning of "corrupt" is to falsify, adulterate, or debase, in this case the language - that which links us to others.

In "The Penal Colony", Kafka describes an ingenious machine for torturing to death a man condemned for disobedience. The device is equipped with ink-jets, which inscribe the name of the crime on the victim's body, even as he bleeds to death. "This condemned man, for instance, - the officer indicated the man - will have written on his body: 'Honour thy superiors'."

The whole process of writing as killing takes 12 hours. This calligraphy of colonialism might be called "being killed by description", as the body is ripped to shreds by those who hold the pen. There is no question here of the victim having his own pen; he doesn't speak. His version of events, his story, will not be considered. Even his own body carries the inscription of the other.

Collective or shared stories, linked by implicit agreement about how the future should be, or about the sort of people who are preferred - heroes, leaders and the morally good on one side; devils, villains, the ignored and the bad on the other - can also be called ideologies, traditions, beliefs, ways of life or forms of power. After they've been told for a while, stories can turn into politics, into our institutions, and it is important that they seem to be just the way things are, and the way they have to go on being. It is always illuminating to think of those groups and individuals who are denied the privilege of speaking and of being listened to, whether they be immigrants, asylum seekers, women, the mad, children, the elderly, or workers in the third world.

It is where the words end, or can't go, that abuse takes place, whether it's racial harassment, bullying, neglect, or sexual violence. Silence, then, like darkness, carries something important about who the authorities want others to be, something important about the nature of authority itself, and the way it wants to dehumanise others in the silence.

Of course different systems use different methods to ensure silence. From the cutting off of tongues to the burning of books, or the use of sexual morality as well as covert prohibition - like ignoring people, for instance - all are different ways of ensuring a dictatorship of voices, or of maintaining the single voice. If one person tells another who they really are, while denying them the right to self-description, certain kinds of self-doubt or inner disintegration will follow. People can be formed and also deranged by the stories others tell about them. When Jean Genet was told he was a thief, it was a label it took him most of his life to escape. The necessity of a certain interpretation of reality, and the imperative that this idea be maintained, couldn't be clearer than in families. Children are soon made aware of the force of a particular description and of its authority. While most parents are aware that children develop when they are listened to, they don't always want to hear them.

On their side, of course, children are fascinated by language, especially when they discover that there are words that make the adults crazy or frightened, which make the adults want to slap them, or shut them up. Children can become compelled by any discourse that provokes terror in adults. Therefore, children learn about the language community by discovering what cannot or should not be said. They learn about prohibition and limits, about punishment, about hiding and secrets, and about privacy. When they discover what cannot be said, they have to learn to lie or conceal their words, often from themselves. If they are lucky they become creative and use metaphor. If they are unlucky they go mad.

Depression, for instance, might be called a kind of slowness. It could be seen as a subversive refusal to move at the speed of the others, as the rejection of a banal, alienating consumerist world in favour of an authentic inner puzzlement. But, more commonly, without such an idealisation, it is a slowness that usually takes place in silence, beyond or outside language and symbolisation. The depressed, therefore, do not believe in language as the carrier of meaning. The dead cannot make friends. The depressed person, self-silenced you might say, feels far removed from the source of her words, which may well multiply on their own, and can seem to circulate wildly and without meaning, like birds trapped in an empty room.

The deliberately silent are at least making a point - to themselves - when they suppress or break up their own stories. The involuntarily silent, on the other hand, might feel as though they've had their words fruitlessly stolen from them. But this enforced silence on behalf of the powerful is not for nothing. The mythologising of those not heard is the opportunity for difficult and busy work. The silent other has to be called, for instance, a stranger, foreigner, immigrant or asylum seeker. She might be an exile, an interloper, the one who does not fit or belong, the one who is not at home, the one whose words do not count.

This range of denotions at least makes it clear that we can never stop wondering about our own alien, awkward or foreign parts, the elements that cannot speak except through the use of others. Racism might at least teach us that we are always strange - or other, or unwelcome - to ourselves, particularly when it comes to our need. We might even be aware that there is an odd but intriguing silent reversal here. The sort of capitalism we have has always depended on colonialism, and has always required both labour in the third world and labour from the third world - the immigrant, in other words. And yet our own need has only ever been represented in terms of their need, as their dependence on us. This is frequently manifested as an image of desperate people climbing over barbed-wire fences, eager to come over here and strip us of all we have.

The subject chosen to be strange has an important place. He or she has to be kept constantly in mind; worked over and worked on. It is a passion, this attitude to the threatening foreigner, the outsider, the one who doesn't know our language. Someone has to be kept in their place so that the other can exist in a particular relation to them, so that hatred can flourish. I call this a passion rather than an opinion because these fictions have to be constantly reiterated. They cannot be stated once and for all, since the victim seems always about to escape his description. Unless he's constantly buried and re-buried beneath a deluge of words, and, of course, the actions that words entail, he might turn into someone like us.

If a plausible version of the 20th century can be told in terms of silence and its uses, there is reason for optimism too. That period was also about people insisting on their own words and histories, speaking for themselves. The 1970s, as I recall, were about the formally colonised, gays, women, the mad, children, putting their side of the story, telling it in their own words and being heard. As a result, in some places, there were significant social advances. It has been said that when Pinochet was arrested in Britain, things changed in Chile. The dictator wasn't sacrosanct; people began to speak, his mystique was penetrated at last.

Clearly, though, this description is simplified; there is an absence here. I have implied that on one side the words are there, ready and waiting to go, while on the other they are unwelcome or prohibited, that the only problem with the words is that the authorities don't want to hear them.

However, at the centre of this is something else: the person who doesn't want to hear their own words. This is the person who owns them, who has made them inside his own body, but who both does, and does not, have access to them, who is prisoner, prison and the law. Real dictators in the world are a picture, too, of dictators within individuals, of certain kinds of minds.

If we wanted to create an authoritarian system that was complete, in which there were no loose tongues - or, within an individual, no significant inner life - it would have to be one in which dreams were controlled. Even in prison, under the strictest supervision and observation, a human being can at least dream. Here he might, at least, represent, or symbolise that which cannot, or must not, be said. But how would these dreams be understood? Who would be there to receive the scrambled communications that might be his only hope?

In 1906, an English surgeon, talking to Ernest Jones, mentioned, with some astonishment, a strange doctor in Vienna "who actually listened with attention to every word his patients said to him".

What Freud realised was that because there are forms of speaking that are radically dangerous and unsettling, which change lives and societies, people don't want to know what those words are. But, he adds, in another sense they do really want to know, because they are made to be aware, by suffering, of a lack; they at least know they will not be complete without certain forms of self-knowledge, and that this will be liberating, even though the consequences of any liberation could also be catastrophic.

Human beings leak the truth of their desire whether they like it or not: in their dreams, fantasies and drunkenness, in their jokes and mistakes, as well as in delirium, religious ecstasy, in babble and in saying the opposite of what they mean. It takes a rationalist, then, to see that rationalism can only fail, that what we need is more, not less, madness in our speak ing. Otherwise our bodies take up the cause on our behalf, and bodies can speak in weird ways, through hysteria, for instance in Freud's day, the modern equivalent of which might be addiction, anorexia, racism or various phobias.

Freud invented a new method of speaking, which involved two people going into a room together. One person would speak and the other would listen, trying to see, in the gaps, resistances and repetitions, what else, in the guise of the obvious, was being said. He would then give these words, translated into other words, back to the speaker.

Great individualists though they might be, both Wilde and Socrates, like Freud, used dialogue as their preferred form. Indeed, in another essay, Wilde replaces the Socratic imperative "know yourself" with "be yourself", which might become, in this version of "being" - that of the language community - "speak yourself". The therapeutic couple is one method of seeing who you are by speaking, and it is an original and great invention. But there would be something odd, to say the least, about a society where everyone was in therapy. Not that there isn't something already odd in the idea that only the wealthy can buy mental health.

Fortunately there has always been another place where the speaking of the darkest and most dangerous things has always gone on, which we might call a form of lay therapy. We know this mode of speaking is useful because of the amount of prohibition it has incurred. It is sometimes called conversation, or the theatre, or poetry, or dance, the novel, or pop.

What is called creativity or culture might remind us of Freud's method because many artists have talked about the way words have the knack of speaking themselves. The writer is only there to catch them, organise them, write them down. Even the prophet Mohammed, around whose name silence is often required, was visited by an angel who gave him the law. Mohammed didn't make up these rules himself; they were spoken through him but came from elsewhere. Another instance of the death of the author, or the author at one side to himself, as secretary or midwife to himself, you might say, making a divine law that no human can modify or speak back to.

A culture is a midwife to images and symbolisations, a place where people speak to one another, where words matter and, because they are in the public domain, can be understood or used in a number of ways. It is also where one is forbidden to speak about certain things. It has, therefore, to be a place where the question of speaking and punishment is spoken about. The collective can have a conversation because artists like to loiter near the heat of the law, where the action is. If artists are considered to be on the edge, they are on the edge of the rules, close to punishment, and, like Beckett, not far from silence, where speaking has to be almost impossible if it is to be of value.

What Freud added, and the surrealists knew, along with the other artists who have formed our consciousness, Buñuel, Bergman, Joyce, Picasso, Woolf, Stravinsky, Pinter, was that if the unconscious was to be represented, there had to be new forms for it.

These artists knew that conventional talk and the conventional art accom-panying it had been turned into chatter. They knew this worked as a block or filter to forms of knowledge that were essential if we were not to be silent, or if we were not to racially persecute, and kill one another, for reasons we couldn't understand. Therefore, if modern art and much of what has followed it has been the attempt to say the unsayable, some of these forms can only be ugly and disturbing. These forms have to be banned, dismissed and discouraged, partly because, like most forms of fantasy, they are subject to shame, itself a form of censorship.

To speak at all is to be aware of censorship. The first thing tyro writers come up against, when they uncap their pen, is a block - in the form of a prohibition. They may well find their mother's face floating into view, along with several good reasons why not continuing is a good idea. Freud, a prodigious writer himself, put it like this: "As soon as writing, which entails making a liquid flow out of a tube onto a piece of white paper, assumes the significance of copulation, it will be stopped."

This, you might say, is the imprimatur of good speaking - that there is a resistance which guarantees the quality of the utterance. There are, then, at least two voices called up here, the voice that needs to speak and the voice, or several voices, which refuse, which say these words are so exciting and forbidden that they are worthless. This is what makes any attempt at creativity a useful struggle. What makes it worthwhile is the difficulty, the possibility of a block.

Twentieth-century art has been fascinated by dreams and nightmares, by violence and sexuality, so much so that it might be termed an art of terrible fantasy. One begins to see splits, deep conflicts, terrors, hatreds and a lot of death in these art nightmares. These elements can be put together - somehow fused in a work of art - but they are not always reconcilable. However, irreconcilable parts may find a voice in some form of personal expression, which, partly, is why modern art has been so painful and difficult to look at, even now, and why any new art, to be of value, has to shock us. This is because it breaks a silence we didn't even know we were observing.

At least art brings us beauty as compensation for its message. But it is not, in the end, the favour it might be, because it can be an awful beauty, just as to tell the truth about sexuality might not be to talk about how good or hygienic it is for us, but to speak about how bad or painful it is for us. Speaking, listening, being known and knowing others. We might say that at least, if everyone doesn't get much of a turn, we live in a representative democracy. This, at least, separates us from various fundamentalisms. We can vote; we believe we have politicians who can speak for us. Yet one of the reasons we despise politicians is that we suspect they are speaking on their own behalf while purporting to speak on ours. Our words, being handed on by our representatives, are not getting through and they never will. Our speaking makes not a jot of difference. One way of looking at globalisation, for instance, is to say that it is a version of certain Orwellian authorities saying the same thing, over and over, the attempt being to keep new words, or any human doubt, need or creativity, out of the system.

Surely, then, if politicians cannot possibly do the trick, artists might do it. Speaking from themselves and sensibly refusing to do advertising, they do nonetheless speak for some of us, and they take the punishment on our behalf too. In the absence of other convincing figures, like priests or leaders, it is tempting to idealise artists and the culture they make.

Nevertheless, in the end, there is no substitute for the value of one's own words, of one's story, and the form one has found for it. Sartre, in his autobiography Words , says, "When I began writing, I began my birth over again." There is something about one's sentences being one's own, however impoverished and inadequate they might feel, which is significant, which makes them redemptive. If you wanted to tell someone you loved them you usually wouldn't get someone else to do it for you.

If there is to be a profusion, or multi-culturalism, of voices, particularly from the margins of expression, then the possibility of dispute and disagreement is increased. The virtue and risk of real multi-culturalism is that we could find that our values are, ultimately, irreconcilable with those of others. From that point of view everything gets worse. There is more internal and social noise and confusion, and more questions about how things get decided, and by whom. If the idea of truth itself is questioned, the nature of the law itself is altered. It can seem conditional, for instance, pragmatic rather than divine, or at least subject to human modification or intervention, if not control.

There are always good reasons not to speak, to bite our own tongues, as many dissidents, artists and children will testify. It will offend, it is dangerous, hurtful, frightening, morally bad, others will suffer or they will not hear.

But the good thing about words, sentences and stories is that their final effect is incalculable. Unlike violence, for instance, which is an unmistakable message, talking is a free form, a kind of experiment. It is not a description of an inner state, but an act, a kind of performance. It is an actor improvising - which is dangerous and unpredictable - rather than one saying lines that have already been scripted. "The thought is in the mouth," as Tristan Tzara put it. It is not that we require better answers but that we need better questions. All speaking is a demand, at first for a reply, proving the existence of communication, but, ultimately, for an answer, for more words, for love, in other words.

You can never know what your words might turn out to mean for yourself or for someone else; or what the world they make will be like. Anything could happen. The problem with silence is that we know exactly what it will be like.

About this article

Hanif Kureishi on the power of words

This article appeared on p4 of the Guardian review section of the Guardian
on Friday 6 June 2003.
It was published on
the Guardian website
at 08.02 EDT on Saturday 7 June 2003.
It was last modified at 08.02 EDT on Friday 13 June 2003.
It was first published at 08.02 EDT on Friday 13 June 2003.